Steve Bisson/Savannah Morning News - Arthur Brannen, age 77, sits at the edge of the Wilmington River mending a cast net in 1998. Brannen rode his bicycle to the cemetery for years because he said it was the only place in the city that he coould find peace and quiet.

On Monday, when the members of the Sinn Fein Society gather at 6:30 a.m. for their famous Green Grits breakfast, they have one seat reserved for an old attendee — a whimsical leprechaun named Arthur Brannen.

Next month marks 10 years since Arthur, at the age of 82, passed away in Jacksonville of heart trouble, doing what he liked to do: Rowing his bateau through coastal creeks, bound for Key West. Sinn Fein Society president Hugh Coleman says Arthur’s chair will hold a pair of his signature white shrimper’s boots. And across it, draped like a marshal’s sash, will be one of his handmade cast nets, dyed an emerald green.

Arthur was not a member but was embraced for years by the Sinn Fein Society, after accepting the invitation one year to be the keynote speaker. He said he had declined a similar invitation from the Hibernians in favor of speaking before a more renegade group.

Arthur spoke at every breakfast he attended. Sometimes, according to Tom Mahoney, he was introduced as an honorary historian or as a guest orator. Paul Jurgensen remembers Arthur as “bright with idiosyncrasies” and recalls one written speech that Arthur chose to deliver, sounding out all the punctuation marks. It made a three-minute speech into a 10-minute one that got more hilarious as it went on.

Troy Bouy, who created the Louisiana-style grits, says that you always left happier after being around Arthur and that Arthur was ahead of his time when he suggested adding green shrimp to the grits.

Arthur, a Bethesda Boy from 1931 through 1940, had shrimp in his veins for a long time. He started out as sort of a Huckleberry Finn, and through his long, happy life, added a few notes of Henry David Thoreau and Will Rogers.

His love for the open air and the creeks and rivers from Isle of Hope to Thunderbolt never faded. Neither did his love for friends and neighbors along all those byways of Montgomery and Bethesda.

He was a very sociable man who just happened to choose camping on little hammocks and islands over having a home with four walls, and who preferred getting around by rowboat and bicycle to anything motorized or speedier.

Joella Baker, who owns Baker’s Pride (where the doughnuts this Monday will be green, no exceptions), says she grew up having Arthur as a family friend. Her uncle Everett Flowers was a Bethesda Boy who long ago bought a burial plot for Arthur next to his own in Bonaventure Cemetery. Arthur often came by the Bakery at 4 a.m. for a hot sweetroll and a cold milk.

After a hernia operation years ago, in order to be discharged from the Charleston VA Hospital, Arthur needed an address and a home to recuperate. Joella’s family provided it, and when he was ready to make his triumphant return to Larry’s Restaurant, he introduced her to everyone as “my young girlfriend Jo.”

Larry Corey says Arthur was a breakfast regular and a cut-up who generally put on a show, making an exaggerated ritual of spreading his own paper towels and using his own plastic utensils. In great detail, he wrote and sketched constantly in his journals about people he met.

When we spent the summer of 1983 on Tybee, my wife and I walked to the Back River every evening to watch the sun go down. Arthur was there then, living under his boat that was propped like a lean-to on the bank, surrounded by his trademark five-gallon buckets.

Nobody knows what became of his journals. I’d love to see them and flip back to that summer to see what he said about us. And if we merited any sketches.

Artist Carol Miller’s painting “In Pursuit of Arthur,” which hangs in her office at City Hall, captures Arthur’s spirit. There he is: Rowing his boat, standing up, facing the bow, with his bicycle stowed on board.

Photojournalist Jonas Jordan took wonderful photos of Arthur over the course of 20 years. Some of Arthur on his bicycle with a bucket on each handlebar. Lots of Arthur playing his harmonica, horsing around and knitting cast nets in Johnson Square. With a wink, Arthur joked that weaving the nets was “good therapy,” which was what some tourists naturally assumed he needed.

Vincent Russo, whose middle name I think is Seafood, says Arthur’s cast nets are perfect, old-school works of art. He is lucky to have three of them.

Vincent gets a kick out of one time that Arthur needed to borrow some money because his ATM card wasn’t working. Vincent joked that he wanted photographic proof of the loan, so used Arthur’s own camera to take a picture of Arthur with an ice-cream sandwich in one hand and a $100 bill in the other. When Arthur returned six months later, after rowing back from Fernandina, he repaid the loan and insisted on a photo of Vincent holding the five $20 bills and an ice-cream sandwich.

Frank Hill recalls how Arthur ate many a lunch at his wife’s restaurant, Teeple’s Seafood. One Thanksgiving, waitress Grace Neidlinger was concerned where Arthur would eat. So Frank’s wife moved the family’s own large gathering to the restaurant for years for Arthur’s sake.

Betty Richards, whose husband, Glaen, was Arthur’s Bethesda classmate, says Arthur brought out the best in people. He was welcome at just about every personal dock in Isle of Hope, to tie up his boat and ride his bicycle to town. And lots of people would go visit him at Burnt Pot Island when he camped there.

She said Arthur would read her some of the poems. Some were about life and love, joy and sadness, about all the things that he felt were blessings from God. He felt that he could look up at the stars and talk to God and that God would answer. He wrote about the many things he was grateful for.

“I remember one poem about how beautiful a cast net was as it was thrown, spreading out like a web against the blue sky, and how it fell like a whisper on the water. And one about the sound of shrimp falling from the net onto the floor of the boat or on the boards of a dock.”

He was cremated in Jacksonville and his ashes scattered there, so at the memorial his friends placed in Bonaventure, they buried a piece of a cast net. Betty says, “My hope is that his ashes, some of them, have found their way to Key West — in the air or on the water — it doesn’t matter.”

Ben Goggins, a retired marine biologist, lives on Tybee Island. He can be reached at 786-6181 or bengoggins9@gmail.com.

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